Summary

In “Run On” Lidia is 37 and living in Southern California and has is a Visiting Writer position at San Diego State. Devin calls her from Paris at 2 a.m. to tell her he is in love. Lidia drinks a bottle of scotch and drives into six lanes of freeway traffic and hits another car. She is taken to jail.

In “Collision as Metaphor” Lidia describes the person she hit in the accident. She is a “small brown-skinned woman who had no English” (222). Her car is totaled on one side. She is pregnant. Lidia sits on the guardrail and comforts her before the cops come. In the cop car, she wishes she were dead. She thinks of her dead daughter and cannot bear to think about the grieving mother or even accept that she exists.